Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

so nauseous and so dizzy. And he had had such a good time, and he did not want to go inside with me. He wanted to go on that ride again. But I had to take him inside, and I had to go lie down for a few minutes, because to that guy I might have been girlie and honey and it was okay, but it was pretty awful for me. So, that’s the story of the merry-go-round. I usually think of myself as a very friendly, gregarious person, but thank the heavens, I never saw that man again. The people who lived directly below us — we were on the second floor of our building, they were on the first — were from somewhere in New York, and she had a very definite Brooklyn or Bronx accent, and they were not particularly educated people. They were working-class people, and I think she worked, and she became very friendly. Um, I was…as I said, I tried to be friendly with everyone, but I wasn’t looking to, y’know, have relationships where I was obligated to spend time with other people. I felt very keenly my responsibility for my little boy, and my desire was to spend as much time as possible with him. But it was all very pleasant and cordial with my neighbors, and there were no true problems, except with this woman downstairs, who I thought was very warm and loving and friendly to me, but who behaved very badly. Mark was usually up very early in the morning. He was never a great sleeper, never ever, never ever. And just when I thought I had it made — that we had gotten past getting up during the night — he would get, um, a runny nose or his schedule would be off, because we went on a holiday or something, and we’d start sort of all over again. He spoke very early, and he spoke very clearly, and I would hear “Mommy,” and it could be the middle of the night, and I would come in and talk to him and sometimes get him, and, um…This time in particular that I’m thinking of, he had his first real cold, and I know that he was then I guess either three and a half or four because he went to the, uh, Jewish Community Center, to the nursery school, and that was the first experience he had had with a real infection from the other kids, ’cause otherwise he was pretty much protected from that kind of thing, and, to tell you the truth, there were many times that I decided not to send him. Either he wasn’t better from a sniffle or Harry Gerner, his pediatrician, whom I called Uncle Harry, and who was my father’s best friend, and who had also been my pediatrician, would say to me, “Must he go there?” Because Mark would almost invariably get ear infections after he had a cold. So, it was a very sort of divided-up experience. He didn’t go regularly as I had expected him to, because of all these other things. But to get back to that dark-haired lady downstairs…when he did get better from whatever thing he’d had that interrupted his night’s sleep, he clearly didn’t want to go back to the habit of just hanging out in the crib or in the bed, and he would call me or he would come into the bedroom, and I would, I finally had to…Uncle Harry said, “You’ve got to put an end to this, you can’t just keep getting up with him. You can’t keep letting him know that he can do that to the two of you. You’re the grown-ups.” But the idea of letting him cry was not something I was happy with at all. But I would go in and…there were no books on the subject the way there are now, like the Ferber method, Ferbering, whatever it’s called. I would come in, and I would talk to him, and I would say, “I’m not coming back now, I’ve been in here three times, I’ve been in here four times, it’s the middle of the night — look outside, see, it’s very dark out and your father is asleep, and everybody in the building is asleep, and I was asleep, and now I’m going to go back to sleep.” And then sometimes I would come back in just one more time, and then finally I just realized I had to do it. And I let him cry. And he cried and he cried. And he called me and he called me and he cried. And it just made me heartbroken. But I knew that that one night was the night where I had to give it a try. And I would speak out to him every once in a while and say, “No, I’m not coming back, honey. In the morning, we’ll talk, and in the morning, we’ll go into the living room,” etc. So she — the woman downstairs — called me the next day, and she let me have it. She said I was guilty of child abuse and she was going to call the police because I let my child scream all night. And she was right downstairs, and the sound could be heard. And it started the second night again, and then, about the middle of the night, he gave up. But she never forgave me, never forgave me for that, and that’s when I realized that those kinds of casual friendships are just made, not because you really care about those people or you choose them because your interests are the same, but because you’re sort of thrown together. And she was mostly a liar because she was not that worried about him, that’s nonsense; she was worried about losing sleep, and she figured the way to not have that happen was to threaten me with something. Child abuse?! Can you imagine someone having the temerity to even insinuate such a thing? I simply adored Mark. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done to make him happy and comfortable. I made sure that his crib was spotless and beautiful, that his bed was spotless and beautiful, that his room was lovely. I was fanatical about that. To a fault, actually. I had this carpet sweeper, and it had a mechanism inside that turns, that went around like this…and Mark must have either moved his hand at that moment or I was just being clumsy and an idiot for having it out…Why did I have to carpet-sweep while he was playing there, why? Something must have just broken or spilled or a box of crackers fell down or something of that sort and of course being me, I just was going to get rid of it right away, and all of a sudden his little hand was there and I rode over one of his fingers and caught it there. It was caught in there. I remember that trying to get it out was horrific, and he was screaming in pain, and it might have even been his whole little hand that was caught in there. But one finger was looking very damaged and purple. And I ran with him into the bathroom, and I know that what I did to him hurt like anything, but I put it under the cold water, and I kept rubbing it and trying to keep it straight and trying to see if there was a broken bone or anything in it. And I felt like I was doing that for hours while he was screaming, but it actually couldn’t have been for more than a few minutes. And then I dried it off and patted it, and he was still very, uh…he was still in great pain. He was in real pain. I don’t remember going to the doctor. I remember calling Uncle Harry, Harry Gerner. He asked some questions about whether Mark could move his fingers, and I made him, once we could get the pain under some control, uh, I made him move his fingers then, because if anything had been broken…I don’t know what they do about something like that anyway, whether they set it or what…Ugh! Ugh! How horrible! I still think about it! Anyway, as I mentioned before, Mark was never a great sleeper and typically he’d be up by five thirty or six in the morning, and, uh, we would have breakfast and talk to each other, and he’d look at his books and, depending on the age, sometimes I would read to him, and then a little later, when he really memorized, he would look at them himself and he would read some of them back to me. And we would talk about what we were going to do during the day, and if it was a bad day or wintertime or rain or whatever, we would decide whether we were going to stay in or go out or, um, if we were going to, in fact, walk over to Nana Harriet’s or go to the supermarket which was right near there, or go out to play in front of the building where there would be other kids, or the myriad other things that would be on the agenda. Sometimes his father would come and pick us up and bring us to Nana Rose’s house, but mostly the days went along with just the two of us…And it was a delightful, heavenly time for us. Until my second pregnancy. The period during which I was pregnant with my second baby was a very difficult time for me. It was a very difficult pregnancy with a very tragic outcome. I was feeling really terribly ill most of the time and I tried to not let Mark know. He was still a very little boy. And I don’t really even know how much he was aware of then, because I never really asked him in the years following that. I didn’t want to bring it up again — first of all, it was still painful to me, because we didn’t have a baby to bring home and, um, I didn’t want to discuss that time over and over again. I felt guilty because, for a number of months during the pregnancy, I had to have him in the care of my mother, and I just was so ill…My doctor this time wasn’t Schneckendorf, the doctor who’d delivered Mark, it was a different man, it was this guy who was very popular with all the young mothers…I don’t remember his name maybe because I don’t want to. He had a reputation for keeping people well sedated so there was no pain, or as little as possible, and I thought, well, I could use that because I was in labor for so long with Mark that I thought, well, that’s sort of dumb of me to, you know, to go looking for that kind of thing again, this would be much better. And then, um, feel good, feel strong, blah-blah-blah. Well nobody knows about these things and how they’re going to happen, but it turns out that this man did every single thing that he could…put it in another way — everything he did was the wrong thing. When I was throwing up constantly and I couldn’t hold anything down in the very beginning of that pregnancy, he clapped me in the hospital. Because he thought he was going to snap me out of this thing. I think he was obviously a misogynist, and he obviously thought this was like a spoiled-girl reaction to being pregnant. You know? That, uh, if I had more to do…that’s what many men said about this, y’know, if you had more to think about…So he clapped me in the hospital and gave me something called Thorazine, which gave me a reaction that was written about in the New England Journal of Medicine . I couldn’t stop my arms from shaking, my voice was way up like this, and I couldn’t stay still. I clawed at the sheets, and I was miserable, and I couldn’t rest, and I was hyper, and I said, “Get me out of here.” I said, “This is not helping. What is this about? There’s nothing wrong with my mind. I’m not emotionally ill. I’m nauseous from being pregnant. Get me out of here, this is awful.” And I said to Mark’s father, “If you don’t take me out today, I am gonna crawl out on my hands and knees.” I was all bloody down both arms, with scabs from doing this, from clawing on the rough hospital linens. And I said, “Just get me out of here. Without the doctor’s permission, just sign me out! Take me home!” And, one way or another, I was finally released. And I was profoundly grateful to be home after that, and everything was fine then — until the hemorrhage. I bent down one night to tie Mark’s shoe — we were at my mom’s and we were just about ready to go home, we’d had dinner there, and I was in, oh, I guess my third month — and as I bent down to tie his shoe, I started to hemorrhage. And I had to go back to the hospital. And I was there a couple of days, at that horrible place where they did nothing positive for me at all, back at that hospital for a couple of days, until they felt that was under control. And then this doctor said that to me, “There is nothing wrong. The heartbeat is very strong. You’re a nice strong girl. Everything is perfect.” And I said, “But I bled buckets. How is that okay?” And he said, “Well…”—he said this prophetically—“well, sometimes the fetus isn’t as firmly attached to the uterus as it should be, and that’s why you hemorrhaged, but everything is fine now, it’s fine.” And, um, then, when I got home this time, I was told I had to stay in bed for at least a month — a stupid idea under any circumstances, but particularly stupid under those circumstances, because if I had gotten up…I should have run up and down about four thousand stairs, because if I had had a miscarriage, it would have been the best thing that could have happened. Instead, during that time, I didn’t even understand what was happening to me. I tried to stay still and sleep as much as possible and not be as nauseous and as miserable as I was, and Mark would come in and I’d talk to him and he’d talk to me. And he was pretty happy with Nana Harriet while the two of us were at her house, living there for that month, but I knew he wanted more from me…I knew that…and I felt terribly guilt-ridden. I never got over feeling that I had ruined his life, that I had done something terrible to him by showing my own weakness in that way and not being there for him. Nevertheless, it didn’t act out in that way. Right after we came home, I seemed to feel a lot better, certainly never really good, but enough better so I could take care of him. I was very nauseous through the entire pregnancy. I was extremely nauseous all the time with each of my pregnancies, but this was worse because I was much weaker. But Mark and I would talk and play, and I was so grateful to be home and to be with him, and he was so wonderful to talk to, and we would sing together. He’s the only person (along with his sister, Chase) who has ever heard me sing, and it’s lucky for the rest of the world that they haven’t, but the two of them seemed to like it. And we would play games and I would say, “Would you like to walk over to Grandma’s now, wanna go see Nana?” And, um, he didn’t know that he was actually walking me. He would hold my hand and we would talk to each other and he — I was his security, which I was supposed to be, but he was mine too. And he was such, always, always, such an interesting person to talk to, and we would really talk to each other, and I never understood quite the women who were so angry at having to be home with their kids, angry that they had no one to talk to and their interests were, um, pitiful because all they could do is talk baby talk to babies. And our life was nothing like that. I didn’t talk baby talk to him and he didn’t talk baby talk back to me. He had questions about things, I had stories to tell him, and he had stories to tell me, and I honestly and absolutely loved our time together and never ever felt as if I was missing something that would have been better than that. So the rest of that pregnancy was “fine”—I just didn’t tell anyone that I threw up every single day, several times a day, and, um, this doctor kept saying things to me like “Look at your hands. Look how beautiful your hands are! What a lovely-looking girl you are.” And, um, “What a beautiful child you have. And this child will be a beautiful child.” And stuff like that. But that wasn’t the answer to any of the questions I really had. I knew that. But I couldn’t have possibly known how badly this was going to end. I went into labor and I went to the hospital and I was knocked for a loop by this doctor. And next thing I knew…well, the next thing I knew was nothing — I was fast asleep, I was out of it. The truth is, what he should have done is, the moment I called him or the day or so before that, he should have been seeing me virtually every day then, in the ninth month, and he should have taken me into the hospital, and either done a cesarean or induced labor and watched me every moment. Because while I was out of it, the placenta — that’s what the fetus is attached to, the placenta — the placenta, which was clearly weak to begin with, burst. And from what I’ve been told years since, I’m lucky I didn’t die. Or needed an immediate hysterectomy at that moment. And the baby was without oxygen — beautiful, beautiful little girl, beautiful dark-haired, perfect-looking little girl…Not a chance, because he was an incompetent. And that guy I told you about, the Italian anesthesiologist, he happened to be in the hospital that day, and he told us later, he might have told your father earlier on, but he told me when he thought I could handle talking about it that he was there and that this man was completely incompetent in the face of what was happening. And so after the birth when I woke up, there were two people punching me in the belly, kneading me, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. Because they had to get everything, every piece, every tiny little piece out, otherwise you can die of fever. So in those senses, I was very lucky, I suppose…But they kept me there a week, which is what they did in those days. Instead of just keeping me overnight or a day or so, and then letting me out of there, away from the sounds of crying infants and the sight of crying infants and happy infants, they made me stay and they thought they were doing something wonderful for me…it was simply the protocol of the day. And the woman they put me in the room with, thinking they were being very compassionate, this woman had a baby who had, um, hemophilia, so that baby was not brought into the room, that baby was having special care in the nursery until about the fourth day, when they felt he was strong enough to come to her. And that’s when I said to Mark’s father to tell the people at the hospital either you release me or I am getting dressed and I am going home. This is beyond bearing. It’s a useless terrible thing that you’re doing. And all right…all kinds of hormones are still very active and, uh, I was not made to feel better, by the way, by the people who kept telling me how lucky I was. That doesn’t work. If anyone wants to know how to help somebody who’s having something awful happening to them, you don’t tell them they’re lucky because they have a beautiful wonderful child and a great family and a husband who adores you and how beautiful you were and um, what a great life you had and how young you were. And I couldn’t stop the tears, I was sobbing, but they just kept running out of my eyes and I couldn’t stop the wetness, it just kept happening. And I knew I had to get out of there and that it was not good. I needed to be able to be just with the people whom I cared about, who cared about me, and I needed to start to live some kind of normal life, and I needed to get away from this a little bit, and not be pushed in this way. There were also a couple of other awful things that happened, or one at least. The head nurse, the day that I was leaving, clearly didn’t like us, didn’t like the looks of my husband, of my father, and didn’t like the way I looked. Uh, to her we were just rich Jews, and she really had such hatred, and it was made very clear, because the day I was getting dressed to leave and I was waiting for Joel to pick me up, she came in and she said, “There’s a question I have to ask you because the proper protocol has not been followed, and I don’t know what to do because I’m having a problem.” And I said, “Why don’t you just wait. I don’t want to talk about anything that’s going on. Please wait for my husband and my father. They’ll be here in a little while. If you have papers to fill out or questions to ask, please ask them.” And she said, “But this is absolutely urgent. We have to know what to do with the baby’s body.” She couldn’t wait to come in to me to talk about my dead baby’s body. Out of spite. Oh, yes. When I turned to look at her, I could not even really believe what I was hearing. She had such a look of sort of satisfaction on her face, to be able to approach me with something that was going to make me feel terrible. I think this was both a class thing and an anti-Semitic thing, but I could be wrong about one or the other. It was very definitely a socioeconomic thing. She didn’t like the way we spoke, she didn’t like the way we looked or dressed. It was all much too much for her. I assumed that she knew we were Jews, and that my father and indeed Mark’s father looked Jewish — I don’t know about me, it’s hard to tell about yourself…I just could not wait to get out of there. I walked toward her, as I remember, one or two steps, because I really wanted to just do something horrible to her, but I was mostly…I was too weak at that point emotionally, I showed my feelings, the tears just rolled down my face, so I couldn’t act tough because I just wasn’t quite ready for that. I could have said awful things to her and I said whatever I said, like “That is a horrible thing to say to me, and I told you that I’m not speaking to you about any of these things. Get out of the room now. I’m getting dressed to go home.” And the truth is, and I’ve lived to rue this, that I never knew what they did with my little girl. And I would have liked to know where she went, and I would have liked some kind of dignity, to the poor little creature who didn’t have a chance to have a life.Читать дальше